Archive for the ‘snowboardering’ Category

There is no feeling quite as bizarre as boarding a flight with nothing but the clothes you’re wearing, a loaner backpack and an empty water bottle. And the only reason I had those two things was so I didn’t feel totally creepy. Moreso I felt embarrassed, hopeless and alone, but I still got on the plane.

I had to. I had no other choice, as some dickhead, Riverwester decided to smash in my window and steal all my luggage, a few hours before I was supposed to head to Denver for SIA. The good news is I made it. I landed, grabbed some replacement socks, underwears, tees, and kept on bopping. What else can a man do? It was better

to be pist and surrounded by free beer and rad people, than to be pist at home, alone on the couch.

And I did get free beer, and I did meet good people, and I did see rad things.

The Free Beer:

Shout out to everyone who helped ease my pain. Ezra at C3, and thus the Nose, kept me moving for a few hours. Dale and the people at flow had a few cans for me, as did the Rome guys. Keith, Lauren and the Burton crew fed me beer and liquor. Several times too. Which was great!

The Burton crew was also rad enough to toss me a couple tees to wear. Thanks for that, gentlemen.

Also, a tip of the hat to Adidas for bringing in coffee guys who kept me going before beer time every day.

The Rad People:

I was a bit distracted this year, I’m not gonna lie. I was dealing with insurance from 1200 miles away and trying to figure out what I lost and what I still had. In fact I’m still finding new things I’ve lost on the daily. But it’s all replaceable. That has pretty much become my mantra.

Anyway, the Yobeat crew. Those dudes are pushing it so hard. It’s an honor to get to hang with them and see what they are doing with that little website. I’m pretty lucky Brooke thinks I’m funny enough to prop up.

crap out of Skullcandy. Lauren O from Burton is a friggin’ peach and so very helpful. I actually got to spend a fair amount of time talking with Ezra from C3 and that dude has some history. Super interesting to hang with him for a minute.

I also met Steve from Bird’s Eye in Brooklyn. I like that guy. He cares about the scene and seems like a rad guy. I would recommend conversation with Steve to other conversationalists. And you can even buy things from his shop.

Then I met this dude:

Jesse is all around solid. I felt bad for busting out on him so quickly, but I’m pretty sure I’ll speak with him again. There are some goofy images of the two of us running around on instergramps. Thanks to his lady for making that the love connection happen. Plus, he said he read this blog. That’s also a good ego stroker.

Old enets compatriots, James and Caitlyn were in the place as well. Fuck, those two are good people. It seems that James has something happening over on Shradtastic, so you might want to check that out. Another old enetster, Jgriffs, is now a Denver local and made sure the nights were super rad. THANKS, J GRIFFS!

Then of course there was Dale Rehberg, Chanelle Sladics, Dave Downing and Chad Otterstrom, who gave me some time. But we’ll get more into that later.

The Things That Were Seen:

This is the woman I call Boss (Bonus: Nose sighting).

Oh hey, Adidas is making boots as well as coffee. They look good as well.

It’s good to know Awesome will be safe for another season.

This Endeavor board was pretty much the best looking thing at the show.

Understairs Jesus with a couple broads named Jenny.

This coat is almost better than getting a tattoo of tattoo gun drawing a tattoo of a tattoo gun.

I apologize for the crappy images, my phone was all I had. Probably should have made them all 3D.

You guys seeing this showdown between Shaun White and Mark McMorris? Shit. I can’t even imagine the pressure on those two. If McMorris doesn’t win, he comes off looking like a real deal asshole. And if he does win, Shaun has to go home and cry on his bed made of gold medals and cash and a ridiculous legacy.

I was really trying to avoid Xgamesy stuff. But I had to watch this video, simply because a Helgason put it out:

Holy shit. Look right there, in the background. Shaun White is co-mingling with other riders. He’s not sequestered in a private Shaun White Stride Gums Lounge. Is this a new Shaun White we are seeing?

People love to go off about who’s going to beat Shaun White, and it’s going to start happening—probably consistently and probably soon. The guy has been on top for a decade now. I’ve wondered time and time again if snowboarding is even fun for Shaun White. It never seemed to be about screwing around with friends, it was about winning. Now I’m wondering if it isn’t getting a bit old for him.

Can he put his game together tight enough to take home medals in halfpipe and slopestyle in Sochi?

What if he did it and walked away? What if he pulled a Craig on us? What if he stepped off that Russian podium, walked into the mountains and never came back? Would we still spit vitriol at him? Would we still blame him for ruining snowboarding?

But that is tangential. I’m here to discuss a young dude that is making me happy that I still follow snowboarding.

Jamie Nicholls, who I once bagged on for being from the UK. This kid is the raddest in the game right now. First off, he is an impressively good rider. You can see him get loose at the Nike Chosen event last year:

Now consider that he grew up riding dry slopes, because he was from the UK.

But apart from that the kid is straight-up 18-year old. He’s out there with friends and having a good time. Blasting off tweets like this:

Then jock-poppa in charge of snowboarding in the UK reprimands him.

In a shocking turn of events, Jock-poppa gets charged at because this is snowboarding and it’s all about having fun and screwing off, it’s not rugby and he backs down, admitting he needs to learn to roll. You don’t see the game get played like that in the USA.

Jamie Nicholls, free to be young again, heads off to Quebec for a contest. He makes it through to the finals, but doesn’t do as well as he hoped to, so he puts out something like an apology on the tweets.

WhoTF is this dude? Dude just brushes it off, essentially says “I’ll do better next time” and goes to hit street rails. Perhaps he feels like he owes his followers this, because he’s on the dole, sucking from the titty of the British sporting public (In case you missed that part). It seems like a noble thing to do.

More importantly it seems like a well-adjusted thing to do. This dude is 18 and apparently has been on the British scene since he was six. Contrast that to Shaun White who played that role for those of us in the US. Shaun has always been on a pedestal. Whether it was self-imposed or done at the bidding of other forces, Shaun has existed completely outside of snowboarding. It’s part of what has allowed him to be so successful, but it’s one of the biggest factors having lead to the incessant Shaun-bashing.

Honestly I hope this kid keeps ripping the shit out of things. According to the European connection, riders like Jamie and his pal Billy Morgan have a good chance of blowing up before they head to Sochi. And, It doesn’t hurt to have the likes of Nike and Salomon behind you. The guy is headed for great things, and he may never really hit it big stateside, but I really hope the next group of contest kids, and more importantly their parents and (for fuck’s sake) coaches, take note on how to be awesome for yourself, your friends and the whole shred game.

Christ, I know what you’re thinking. Get your shit together, Rumorator. You said this was the year you would pump out more than 16 crap-assed posts. Prove it numbnuts. Shit, dude I’ve been writing some hackneyed government website for the past couple of weeks. It’s hard being a pinko these days.

But on with the show, eh.

The Beginning: Triple corked the fuck outta shit.Guys, big news Shaun White triple corked a slopestyle jump (or as us regulars call it, “a jump”). You can see it over on Yobeat, or like everywhere else.

But the more important Shaun White element was that he was on hit NBC show Goon, starring that dude from Friends. The one the was always saying “Whoa!” and “Bada Bing!” That dude is on the sequel to Friends and the show had Shaun White guest starring as Shawn Whyte “The greatest snowboarder of all fictional time™” and to talk about Stride gums.

I actually watched this, and you can too. And honestly, The Blanco was not the worst thing about this show. And this show is not the worst thing on TV. At the same time, it doesn’t really excel as a show. It just falls flat. I assume it will get cancelled. But hey, thanks for advancing the idea that all of snowboarding is just Shaun White.

Dude does triple corks, you know, right?

NEXT!A couple weeks ago my Milwaukee host family, Chip and Metal Brian and 2nd cousin N8zilla, were heading to northern Wisconsin to spend time at a place they just referred to as The Bus. I really tried to flake out on this. I didn’t like giving up a good shred weekend to drive four hours north.

But then things, changed up. The weather turned warm. It was suddenly perfect for northern Wisconsin-ing, and crap for snowboarding. I realized that at some point, every man wants to hang out at a place called “The Bus”. To be at such a place, just to talk shit with friends and drink beers outside is a pretty rad. Plus I learned it was wasn’t really that far away.

It still took forever to get there Friday night. Super dense fog had me travelling 35mph on the freeway and then stuck in the delightful little town of Wittenberg for over an hour. I wasn’t actually stuck but the fog was not letting me find my way out. It was like the Eagles said, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. And we make incredibly shitty music.”

Eventually, I made it and the first thought to enter my head was, “This is where people go to die. This is literally a bus in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Wisconsin.” I ignored that feeling as I have like 3 other times in my life, just took a seat and got into some boozes.

The night consisted of sitting by a fire, drinking whiskey, drinking beer, poking sticks into the fire, trying to bake a potato, telling jokes, listening to black metal, listening to Paul Scheer review Anaconda, and listening to Mysterious Universe Plus episodes. It was shaping up to be a good evening, then I looked over to the condiments table and a saw this laying there:

This led into an hour-long discussion about how uncomfortable I was with a handgun just hanging out. Then I suggested a game that involved Chip and I make a game of doing donuts in our trucks while everyone else tries to shoot the tires . Nobody else was feeling that. Gun culture is still beyond me.

And to address the Chekhov in the room, the gun was fired at a few cans and a metal target, which may have been a frying pan, hanging in a tree.

The LA version naturally just talked about how rad skiing is. This is typical coverage. Snowboarders have always been the foil, so when the recent snowboarding bubble pops, it’s never about how trends are cyclical. The LA Times makes it about how skiing is what’s cool and everyone always comes back to skiing. To the LA Times snowboarding is just a phase you go through, like jewish girls, or other dudes. Snowboarding was never anything real, it was simply a fling. Now let’s get back to what’s important here, that being skiing.

The New York Times, America’s paper of record, uses the same jumping off point, but then addresses how snowboarding hasn’t built in a contingency plan. Snowboardist are essentially drowning themselves in the hottub.

If these predictions are accurate, we’re looking at a 20-30 percent drop in ridership. At first glance that might seem awesome. Less kids sitting around, fucking the whole scene up, right? And most of those kids don’t stick with it anyway. Except for the few of them who become the core riders. But 20-30 percent is a pretty significant drop for the industry. Fewer boards, boots, gloves coats, goggles, neck gaiters. All that shit will take a hit.

Of course, you could say that those that are being skimmed off are probably part of the problem in snowboarding. I feel confident assuming most of the skimmed do not get their gear from the core shops and thus aren’t really impacted those of us who are core+. There may be a new lull in snowboarding coming, and now that we have basked in the good life, are we ready to slink back into the background. Sure. Why not?

Section A :Big changes going on over on the Rumorator twitter account. Yes, MFers this is news. Okay, maybe not news, but certainly it cannot be less important than Mercedes-Benz making a boring-ass ad with Rob Kingwell.

People be all like, “Oh, wolfism. Real original.” But you know what? Fuck’em. Everything has been done and the hackery is in the details. Three-wolf shirts? Over. But Jack London and White Fang. That scat is still as fresh as it was in 1906. We’re on the trail of something bigger here. WolfDog for sure.

It’s about the apex-predatory alliance. Dudes in India are faced with this this everyday: Do I want to be the Tiger, the most feared and elusive beast on the planet? Or do I want to be a Hanuman Langur? Shackled and made to do the bidding of the human hand that feeds me. If dude lived underwater, is he gonna want to be a mollusk? Or Orcinus Orca?

Apex predatory envy.

Man, I once had a dream I faked my own death to get a mamajama to pay attention to me and Micheal Ian Black had the role of fraudulent funeral director. Leading lady was played by Emily Z, who I knew from cafflick church in my youth. She was still rocking that eye patch she had to wear for a few weeks in second grade, too. And see, that put a lot of people off Emily Z. But last time I saw her, like a decade plus ago, she was Wisconsin-cute.

That is Apex predatoryism. Time isn’t even an issue. Even in my sleep. White Faang.

You can feel it in the air around here. The way it hasn’t significantly snowed in 2 weeks. The way the forecast is calling for some rain this weekend. The way it’s the middle of January and 40 degrees. Fuck it, it must be banked slalom time.

So you skipped the A-rob Smashlife Banked Slalom and you didn’t make the cut for the Mt Baker Banked? It’s cool, you can ride the Legendary Tyrol Basin Focus Boardshop in Madison Banked Slalom.

That’s right, this weekend, all of us Midwestern oldsters can prove our worth and push our chairlift to on-snow time to 8:1. Certainly, there will be some gear for the winners, but these aren’t the class of people I run with. I’m more with the side bets and slugging beer at the starting line crew. Shit is gonna get raw. Well, at least old man raw.

Anyway here’s the promo poster for it:

Which might look like something you’ve seen before, because you know, fuck a designer.

Guys (I mean this in the gender-neutral, all inclusive way), it’s just snowboarding, right? I mean yeah, there are millions and millions of dollars in the game now, but it’s still snowboarding. It’s still all about being out there, having fun with your friends and stomping trip corks. And if you believe that you are fooling yourself. This shit it real life.

Item #1Mastering Snowboarding

Look kid, you want to get out there and really master some snowboarding? Try it like this: First, buy my book. Second, master snowboarding.

You want to know about techniques? They’re in my book. By the time you’re done purchasing and reading my book you will have mastered snowboarding techniques, like the “Turn” and the “Go Straight”. I’m also going to show you how to do the tricks. The section on japan airs is pretty short. It reads, “It’s not going to look good when you do it, so don’t try unless you’re alone.” Of course, there is also a 47-page chapter on the method. We’ll be going over and over and over that one, so you don’t fuck it up. You don’t want to look like that fat fuck, Rumorator, and spend your junior year with desktop wallpaper of you doing a girl method, do you? Shit, I should have written this book years ago for him.

Equipment is important, so we cover that too. You think you can just show up at the ski area with Ten Things I Hate About You on VHS and a dog-eared copy of Taming of the Shrew talking about intertextuality? WRONGO, dude. Wrongo. You need equipment. Specifically boots, bindings and a snowboard. WHOA, SPOILER ALERT!

But still, buy the book, it’s packed with important strategies. Because this is Mastering Snowboarding, we’re gonna start with the basics like, “Stop sitting on the ground, like a cripple, to put on your bindings”. Stand up and do it. Honestly, it’s not that hard. I even saw that shitbag, Rumorator, do it standing up while smoking a cig.

We’ll also cover these important strategies:

Bury your beers in the snowbank by your car. That way they are chilled when you want them. But, be sure to mark your burying spot with a stick and remember not to piss on them.

You can also bury beers on the hill for later use.

When your getting on the chairlift, remember: goofy-footeds go on the left, regulars on the right.

Seriously, parking lot beers are the best.

Have you tried those NXTZ necktubes? Unbelievable. Whole new world with those things on.

see what it’s really about. I imagine it being too similar to the Skateboarding Freestyle books the library had when I was a youth.

Take note: I have never written a book.

Item #2 Perhaps with all of their book money Hannah and Tawnya can each buy a new Mercedes Benz C350 with 4matic.

Where do we start with this rubbish?

Clearly these people don’t read Boardistan. Don’t they know towing kills? This shit isn’t big wave surfing. This isn’t Laird Hamilton. There is no need to be pulled around for side hits like this.

Rob Kingwell, you and your strange accent urge the viewer to trust you that this is going to be epic. But it’s incredibly unepic. This is some wakeboarding style happening here. I’m surprised there are no white sunglazzles shown and that Brooke Geery isn’t around to write an article about it.

I guess this is to demonstrate the traction of the 4matic, but I’m pretty sure most cars could do this with or without four-wheel drive. But hey, Jackson Hole, snow and a snowboarder. It all comes together for a prefect example of extremism and why you should buy a Mercedes.

It seems Brain Farm produced this piece for MB. It’s rad that they got paid, but I kind of feel bad for them because they probably had something way cooler in mind and then the client kept pulling it back and pulling it back. Because that’s how advertising works. Good ideas get fucked over and over and over until no one is happy.

The 9000 pound rhinoceros in the chatroom:
Let’s just deal with this before we go on.

A-man rode this. That legal weeding MFer, splittered up as far he could go, then boot packed the rest. When he got to the top, he rode a snowboard back down. Holy shit, right? He’s just like, “Swot I do.”

Let me tell you this: A-man is legend in my house. LEGEND. You thought his split adventures and rope skipping were the end of it. Nope. Dude destroyed the Supernatural event with double-helichopters. He comes back next season, kills us with a quarter-helichopter, and somehow it’s progress. Then, he gets back on the splitter and does this.

In my mother’s house they just hung a portrait of A-man over the dining room table. Full fucking aureola. But then again, they were never very good cafflicks.

What else is news?
All the news that is news revolves around little sleep, fewer showers and a lot of standing in the snow. The office was shuttered between the winter solstice and New Year’s Day, so I spent as much time as possible riding on snowboards. It was fun. Early on I felt old, then I felt young and spry, then after like 5 days in row, my body felt old again. But that could be because I chose not to bother with things like sleep or healthy living.

There is also the issue of this thing:

Man, I’ve been riding on snowboards for a couple of decades now. And I’ve been suckered into some real-deal snake oils. Leashes, low backs, chain wallets (time is still gonna tell on this one) and Forum Snowboards, just to name a few. So when saw this NXTZ gear come up, I was thinking, “Well that’s cute.”

But I wanted to support it. American made products, good styles and fuck it, Dale is behind it. I was 75% on board. Then, Yobeat did one up with those fucking cats and I was sold.

Broder, I don’t even like cats, but that was just too good. Here’s another thing: Brooke made me pay for that shit, so I wasn’t even about to be Swayboardered. But you know, backing Yobeat, backing NXTZ, backing Dale’s vision for the brand, I can only dream of all my purchases being so considered.

This thing is ridiculously warm. It’s to the point now that I don’t want to ride without it. I guess I never really noticed how much cold air was blowing through my neck hole, but I do now when I’m necktubeless.

Plus, it’s enabled me to run a lot less gear and stay warm. Often this year, I’ve been out in vests and light coats with the necktube. And that’s not like running vests and light coats in Tahoe or Mammoth, shit is cold here. This is Wisconsin. We ride trash heaps and fake snow.

J-Pop America Fun Time NowAfter I was old and all snowboarded out, I made the trip to Chicago to spend New Years Eve with C-blast, Metal Joe, and Xine.

Xine was recently run down by a car, but she was still able to hobble around with us. Anyway for as long as I have known Xine, she has been talking about the Xine family New Years party and how I really need to go. A decade later I’m there.

Holy fuck, how did I ever miss this? There were like 100 people there, all family and close friends. And the food. Tables and tables and tables of pickled vegetables, sushi, sashimi, Japanese soups and deserts and it was all so good.

But that was only half of it. Her family is the family you wish you had—all so friendly, intelligent, rad and super welcoming. It was pretty much the best New Year’s Day I’ve ever had. Tip of the hat to this lady:

Guy: Whoa guy, where you been?Other guy: Guy, you wouldn’t belieb. Been buried under a mountain of words to be written about a fucking washing machine. Maytagging the fuck outta brains.Guy: Sounds like shits, guyOther Guy: Right. I ain’t even blogged in like 8 days. Twice dead. I need like 10 days supply of beer, guy. Fuckin office man got me down. Corpbros.

Hey, thank you all for stopping by rumorator.com to read this little blog. I’m not sure if you caught on, but the opening scene was my excuse for not keeping this shit up to date. Both roles were played by me. I also wrote and directed that piece.

Shall we get on with it? We got a lot to cover. So much so that the normal numbering system may not work. But stick with it. Hopefully it won’t be a total waste of your time. And if it is, just think to yourself, “Sheesh, at least I didn’t write that.”

1rd: Shred A

Last weekend I hanged with college cronies. We went to shitty bars and drank crap beer. But all was cool. Then, I woke up Saturday morning to learn that some 14-year-old dude won the Beijing Air and Style event by tossing down a Backside 1440 something cork something.

Let me be oldish man here for a minute: I’ve seen this dude’s maneuver. He spun the shit out of it. There was plenty of air, but not so much in the style column. Now, I could go on about spin-to-win and all that, but it’s just another example of the gap between snowboarding and Snowboarding.

Jamie Lynn never won shit with his methods. Gigi and Nico Mueller developed into the style machines they are long after they got off the contest train. Blah blah blah. Apart from Kazu, style seems to be noticeably absent from the Snowboarding circuit. It’s just the way it is. The ones who go pop are the ones who sell records.

Then again, 14-year-old dude probably was the provincial hot tamale in a soup without seasoning.

2stOlymdics Team USA! USA! USA!

So what’s up with these people? They don’t get to smoke weed? What about harder drugs? Which

Jesus, if you haven’t watched this yet, and you like seeing dudes bang the fuck outta rails, go watch it now. So good. Also, good work by Stepchild for putting this out there free. I think they were one of the first crews to sell downloadable vids for $3. Then they realized fuck it. Just give it away. It’s a twenty-5 minute advertisement anyway. I could think of some other companies that may want to look at this model.

But yeah, killing it in this video: E-man, J Sexton, and Lane Treeter. Holy fuck, where did that dude come from?

This lovage landed in the inbox well over a week ago and I’ve been meaning to post it up. That has kind of been my unintentional approach to the entire We Look Sideways project—it’s always been on the radar, just towards really, really close to the edge. Then again it’s a European project. I’ll add that to my list of excuses.

Nonetheless, it’s a really cool project. The people behind it seem to be some top notch MFers. Give it a look. And when they finally bring this project to North America, maybe you can get involved. Or find some other reason to not send in a pic of your eyes, shifted.

I had a very similar project I was tackling in college, but it was just asses. And I only had like 5-8 pics. Definitely a strong piece.

Thanks to Matt Barr for bringing this to my attention. He and some other raddest people on the enetz, Chris Moran, Rian Rhoe, et al., were knuckle deep in it.

Have I kissed enough asses yet? Do I get to go to Europe and talk about snowboarding all the time now?

At least we didn’t have to break out the lighter fluid. I don’t know if that shit happens in other places, or if it’s just some Tyrone’s Basement anomaly. But it happens every year.

By late March, the local ski-knoll has rags and jugs of lighter fluid for anyone to use at the bottom of the hill. You see, the snow is melting down, and half of it is artificial anyway, so the snow filthy. That filth collects on your base and after two or three runs it’s like trying to ride on Velcro hook-and-loop fabrics. The lighter fluid strips the filth from your base, and I’m pretty sure it destroys the base as well.

And people do this with complete disregard for the amount of lighter fluid being dumped directly on the ground, their gear, and their exposed skin. Sheeeit. In oh-six I saw a dude, trying to light a cig, go up in flames after using this method. Everyone just let him burn down to ash.

But none of that happened this weekend. Even though it was pushing 50 degrees on Saturday. It also rained. A lot. We still rode. Even tried a few tricks. Then we stood in the rain and drank parking lot beers. Fuck man, it was near perfect. Sure the entire knoll wasn’t even open yet, and there were only a few rails, one jump and the light was flat as that girl you dated in college

when you were on that “boobs don’t matter” bender. And it was nearly a downpour. None of that mattered. It was still snowboarding. It was rad.

Also, at the risk of shayboarderism: I was kept very dry by to my Holden Durden pants and my super old AK Gore-Tex XCR coat. Thanks to those companies for making good products. But Holden, maybe you guys could work on making buttons that stay on the garments for longer than 25 minutes.

@ndSocial Medium

There is something wonderful about this tweet:

GingSTEELE is enetz radness for sure. Part-shred mama. Full-time mama. Pretty stoked she’s back on the tweets. Buttfuck, get with that tweet. That thing is heavy. The story she is telling is way bigger than 140 characters. The language is great. Such suspense—WILL SHE BE ABLE TO DO IT? I’m gonna read that tweet like 30 more times.

That NdGT tweet above GingSTEELE’s is solid as well.

#rdI’m a Writer

You guys remember when I got a degree in Creative Writing? You guys remember when I got wait-listed at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and rejected from a grip of other top graduate schools in the country?

Yeah, those were good times.

But now, after all those years of fretting over unrecognized genius, self aggrandizing bloggery, and realignment of life dreams, Simon & Schuster has decided to enter the game of self-publishing.